Fly by Wire: The Geese, the Glide, the Miracle on the Hudson

First you should know that I am a retired US Airways pilot. I not only flew the Airbus aircraft, I flew THAT Airbus, just not on that day. This is a shortened version of my review of "Fly by Wire" that I wrote some time ago for a friend who asked my opinion. That friend is also a retired aviator.William Langewiesche rubbed me the wrong way within the first dozen pages. He impressed me as a pompous ass who is willing to judge others who understand things much better than he does.On page seven, he belittles the president of the NTSB hearing by saying, "...and he seemed to have trouble tracking some of the testimony that followed."On page seven, he belittles pilots with statements such as, "...he was capable of intense mental focus and exceptional self-control. Normally these traits do not much matter for airline pilots, because teamwork and cockpit routines serve well enough." And on page eleven, "Sullenberger ... ignores the fact that, with exceptions, the `best and the brightest' have never chosen to become airline pilots..." And this: "If you had to pick the most desirable trait for airline pilots, it would probably be placidity." This is hooey!First, the best and brightest have almost always sought careers with the airlines. This is because the pay and working conditions for an airline pilot are almost always better than any other flying job. Second, many other personal traits are much more important to being a successful airline pilot than placidity. One of these is intelligence, a trait he pooh-poohs as not only of low importance, but also as generally absent among airline pilots. I was a Mensa member when I started my airline career and I'm sure that many of my fellow pilots could also qualify.It is clear that Langewiesche has never spent any significant amount of time getting to know airline pilots as a group. There are several traits that are shared by most of us. These include intelligence, self-confidence, leadership under pressure, almost obsessive attention to detail, an ability to prioritize tasks at hand, and a generally inflated ego.In spite of my poor initial impression of the author, the discussion of the event is good. Langewiesche goes into more detail on geese than I need, but his chronological description of how things unfolded is good and well written.It seems that he doesn't really understand aerodynamics when he tries to explain (on pages 77 and following) something about how a fixed-wing (as opposed to a rotary-wing helicopter) airplane glides. He confuses glide ratio (also called glide angle, measured in feet per mile) with rate of descent (feet per minute).He is also under the misconception that the A-320 can maintain a 1000 feet per minute glide rate with no power from the engines. This is incorrect. In a sustained glide, Sully's Airbus would have descended at about 2000 feet per minute. The additional time in the glide was due to some combination of the left engine's meager thrust output and the momentum of the aircraft as it lost power at the top of the descent, not because it somehow has overcome the laws of physics through better design.Langewiesche seems to have the idea that pilots don't like the Airbus and its computer-based flight protections. He says as much on page 156. "...to acquire airplanes that diminish the authority of pilots in flight." If he thinks that the type of airplane I fly diminishes my authority as captain, he is seriously misinformed. The captain's authority has less to do with actual airplane handling (stick and throttle) than with flight conduct and management.While I do like the Airbus and its systems, I don't like the Airbus's restrictions on engine power. There are times when you really do want 110% from your engines, but the Airbus won't let you have it. The Airbus engineers have decided that even though the engines will be destroyed along with the rest of the airplane as you descend into the ground during a bout with a downburst, you will not be able to risk breaking those engines by overboosting them. Other manufacturers don't think like that. In the Boeings I have flown, it's possible to get 5-10% more thrust from the engines than they are rated to produce. Sure, it will damage the engines, probably requiring them to be changed, but isn't that better than flying into a bridge in Washington, DC, as Air Florida did? If they fail while giving 110% you are no worse off than you were before, since 100% was going to result in a crash anyway.Around page 137, Langewiesche implies that many airline accidents are caused by poor piloting. While some are, we are learning more and more that most of them are not caused by that. Historically it has always been expedient to blame two dead pilots for a crash. If the authorities can do that, then there is nothing wrong with the airplane design, with the training, with ATC, with weather monitoring, or with anything else that might need expensive modification. How many crashes in the 1940's and 1950's were caused by downbursts and microbursts before these weather phenomena were discovered? How many of those crashes were blamed on the dead pilots?Langewiesche blames the captain of the Colgan Air (often incorrectly described as Continental Airlines) flight 3407 as the cause of that plane's crash while on approach to Buffalo. That crash resulted from failure to recognize the stick pusher as the last warning before a stall. The captain pulled back against the pusher when the airplane automatically tried to pitch down to recover from an impending stall.I don't know how Colgan Air trains its crews, but I have been familiar with stick shakers and stick pushers since I first flew an airplane that had them. My training included approaches to stalls in simulators to allow me the opportunity to recognize and recover from them. Did Colgan Air do the same for its crews? According to the Wall Street Journal (11 May 2009), they did not. "Capt. Marvin Renslow had never been properly trained by the company to respond to a warning system designed to prevent the plane from going into a stall..."It appears that in the case of Colgan Air 3407, the failure was more with the airline's pilot training and not so much with the pilot.It's easy for Langewiesche to blame the dead pilot, while proclaiming that an Airbus would never allow that situation to develop, but the Airbus crash reported on pages 140-151 belies that view. Airplanes, like other machines, can never be made idiot-proof because idiots are too ingenious.I had no idea that Sully's airplane was so badly damaged during the touchdown. I had heard that a male passenger pushed past the aft flight attendant and opened one of the rear floor-level doors, thereby admitting the flood. While on page 191, Langewiesche tells us that this is correct, the main flooding appears to have come from the holes in the floor at the rear of the fuselage.In spite of Langewiesche's apparent disdain for airline pilots, I thought this was a great read. He gave good, concise descriptions of several accidents besides Sully's that I had heard of previously. He did get a few technical details muddled, but I don't think I caught him in one true error. This tends, to me, to lend credence to his entire book.The one thing that is overlooked by so many who review this accident is the single most important thing that occurred in those few minutes following the engine failures was the DECISION to land in the river. There are many pilots who could have made that landing, but very few who would have made the decision to ditch rather than to find someplace on land to put the plane down. Sully's skill at airplane handling certainly helped, but it was the decision that saved all those people.If it hadn't been for the note taking for this review that I did along the way, this would have been a fast read. It was certainly entertaining and enlightening. Maybe Langewiesche isn't such a pompous ass after all.

William Langewiesche is such a great writer... It is truly a pleasure to read his writing. He tells an interesting 3rd person tale of the miracle on the Hudson. It is very illuminating to hear not just from the pilot, not from the authorities, not from the manufacture, but from an expert that understands them all and can tell the story bringing all the various viewpoints together. Throughly readable and enjoyable.

Beautiful. This is a superb job of good reporting (the first rough draught of history) by one of America's best journalists (at 'Vanity Fair'); it's somewhat hurried, but packed with enough detail to give real meaning to the basic story. Capt. Chesley 'Sully' Sullenberger is rightly praised; so are numerous others including the Airbus designers of "fly-by-wire" technology which Langewiesche credits for the avoidance of complete disaster. As a private pilot, he has a visceral feeling for the reality of flight which adds immensely to the credibility and impact of this book. He's bitter about the impact of deregulation on airline employees, especially aircrew. On that basis, I feel he somewhat ignores the excellence of U.S. Airways employees. On a personal basis, I work with U.S. Airways volunteers several times a year, including just weeks after this event. Their professionalism, expertise and commitment to public service is always immensely helpful. It's a pity he didn't include the responses of home office personnel (Tempe, Ariz.); theirs is also part of the underlying story of why everything turned out as well as it did. That said, having personally worked in aircraft flight testing, soloed as a sailplane pilot and been an occasional right-seat cockpit passenger ("keep your hands off everything and you can sit up here"), this book is a treat in explaining modern aviation in basic terms. Langewiesche fulfills the "five W's" of good journalism, the Who, What, When, Why and How of every good story. He even gives a good account of the geese (they were Canadian commuters). Fly by wire? It's the term for using computer controls, similar to all modern military high-performance aircraft. Every computer is only as good as the programmers; the advantage is computers can be tested and tweaked a thousand times before being installed. Human error at Boeing resulted in a lack of fasteners to hold the Dreamliner together; by the time it flies, the computers will have been tested a thousand times, perhaps ten thousand times, to make the finished aircraft as safe or even safer than Airbus technology. Companies learn by experience, as do pilots. He gives due credit to Capt. Sullenberg, "His performance was a work of extraordinary concentration, which the public misread as coolness under fire." Trust me, any unexpected sudden loud noise while flying produces instant "extraordinary concentration." Great pilots know immediately what to do, then think about what caused the noise. It's why everyone lived through this accident. It is brief, casual, packed with clearly understandable detail and salted with revealing and sometimes humorous facts about other crashes. He explains, ". . . the NTSB found in a study of the most lethal 50 percent of U.S. airline accidents from 1983 through 2000 that 86 percent of the occupants survived." Langewiesche explains why. It provides a clear understanding of why aviation is the safest means of travel. It's due to the commitment of employees who still feel obligated to the "magic" of flight, the genius of aircraft designers and the personal sense of responsibility of everyone in the industry. A miracle? No, this is the quality of modern aviation.

It starts with such an abrupt reference to the crash and the subsequent NTSB hearing that I wondered what was going on. The author seemed somewhat dismissive. Then, summary over, he got started properly and what followed is a fascinating overview of the flight in the context of similar and not so similar events. It is made even more compelling by his breaking down the flight into discrete elements, each of which provides an opportunity to look at aviation history as regards that particular aspect. Overall, his point is well made, that the pilots did an excellent job (unlike some others in history), but they were ably assisted by a plane designed to keep the most obvious and avoidable mistakes out of the equation. Interesting reflections on how we've reduced airline pilots to highly skilled low paid workers (relatively, for their skill), all because we want the cheapest ticket. To paraphrase a source, you can have cheap, safe and convenient, but only two at a time. Excellent read... and a complaint? It stops just when a review of the aftermath would have been interesting... oh well.

This is an excellent analysis of the ditching of an Airbus into the Hudson River in New York that left the pilot a hero and the aeroplane just another aeroplane. But, says the author, that's doing the 'plane a massive disservice. To understand why, you really need to read the book. It's not that the pilot wasn't a hero, showing grace under pressure and an affinity to his machine that went beyond the norm, it's more that the 'plane, and the men who designed it, helped him massively in his minutes of crisis. If you've even a passing interest in flight, you'll enjoy this book. It wears its learning lightly, is exceptionally well written given the subject it surveys and you're left feeling there's not going to be a better book written about this incident. Recommended.

It may be just short of two hundred pages in length, but author William Langewiesche makes every page count - no, every word count. I've read some of Langewiesche's work in Vanity Fair, and this story is written with the same disciplined flair and journalistic flow. But here he has the time and space to really show his mettle. It's an absolutely gripping read, and though we all know that the US Airways flight was successfully ditched in the Hudson without any loss of life, the author made sure that this reader was left with a nail-biting climax that saw the last few pages 'fly' past. That I learnt a lot about aviation, pilot psychology, and airline design along the way without being bored or distracted from the main event is further proof of Langwiesche's absorbing style. He sure knows how to write a great story.

This was a good insight into what happened to that flight, and the history and also what happened to other flights. In these days of computer technology, and especially recent incidents with certain other aircraft, it was an education. And importantly, the writer gave more than one viewpoint of what occurred and what was going on behind the scenes. Definitely glad I bought and read it.

I've read a few books of this type and most are utterly critical of the airbus fly by wire model. This book is the opposite. While accepting that it can create issues, it also highlights the part that FBW paid in helping the miracle on the hudson happen. Not to mention the number of incidents that never began because the plane prevented a pilot from making a human error.It doesn't criticise Sully or the crew in anyway, or take away from their achievement, but it does provide context around it and show the part that good design played in the successful outcome.A good read and a welcome change from all the books that ignore the positives of FBW and focus only on the negatives.